Author Archives: Ryan Woodside

The University of Aberdeen’s final exam schedule is spread out across three weeks. Because of this extended time frame, a few friends and I were able to fit a two-day trip to the Shetland Islands between studying for exams. The Shetland Islands are a group of islands north of mainland Scotland. We took an overnight […]

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After finishing up WWOOFing throughout the UK, as I talked about in my last blog, Gabbi and I headed to London. We spent a day in London before flying to Salzburg, Austria and, then, taking a train to Vienna. London is a massive city filled with tons of things to do. So, what do you […]

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In my freshman year at Hope I had the opportunity to participate in an immersion trip that went and did some volunteer work in Jamaica over spring break. The trip had been advertised to me by a friend as an opportunity to experience all the benefits of a vacation while also doing some good for […]

After spending nearly three weeks traveling around the UK and mainland Europe for the University of Aberdeen’s spring break, I arrived back at Aberdeen late last night. I rarely had reliable WiFi on the trip, so I had planned on submitting a few blogs about the trip today. When I went to do this; however, […]

Hi everyone, Due to a couple of stressful weeks of classes, I haven’t gotten to posting in a while, so I have some catching up to do. Over the past few weeks, Scotland has been hit by a couple of snow storms. Although there was never more than 2 or 3 inches of snow on […]

In the first week of classes, the University of Aberdeen hosted a refresher’s fair aimed at introducing new students to its large number of clubs and societies. I went to the fair and signed up to be notified about when most of these groups met. Fast forward one month, and I am bowling my first […]

As an aspiring poet and avid reader of poetry, I was familiar with Robert Burns and his work before coming to Scotland; however, I was not familiar with the celebrations hosted on and around January 25th (Burns’ date of birth) to commemorate the famed Scot. “Robert Burns Night” or “Robbie Burns Night” is a very […]

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Fear of Missing Out. It’s an expression you will hear pretty frequently if you are considering studying abroad. It is also the reason most of my peers at home have given for why they are choosing not to study abroad. Now, the intention of this blog IS NOT to criticize choosing not to study abroad […]

I am the kind of person who doesn’t like to make mistakes. In fact, this is one of the reasons I chose to study in Scotland: because it is an English-speaking country and, not being multilingual, I figured that I would make a fool of myself in any country where English is not the main […]